FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Helper: Friday 4/13/18

Well, let's hope you aren't superstitious because it's Friday the 13th, the first of two in 2018. But ease your mind because we also have 13 baseball games to distract us on FanDuel's main slate. More games means more pitching, but as it turns out, it's a fairly straightforward day on that front. Of course, we'll still have plenty to wade through on the hitting side, with some of the highest implied team totals belonging to the Boston Red Sox, Houston Astros, Los Angeles Angels, and Washington Nationals. Also, note that the contest between the Chicago White Sox and Minnesota Twins has snow in the forecast, so don't be surprised if that one gets the axe tonight.

Our daily helper is available every day to analyze FanDuel's main slate and help give you a starting point when you're building lineups. Be sure to also incorporate our great tools into your research process. Whether you're looking for daily projections, the latest starting lineups and weather, or batting and pitching heat maps to find the best matchups -- we've got you covered! And don't forget to take a listen to The Solo Shot podcast with Jim Sannes, who breaks down the MLB daily fantasy slate each day.

On that note, let's highlight some of the top options for today's FanDuel main slate.

Pitchers to Target

High-Priced Pitchers

Gerrit Cole ($10,000 on FanDuel): Is this new Gerrit Cole for real? Through two starts, Cole has been lights out with a 1.54 SIERA, 43.1% strikeout rate, and 5.9% walk rate. Sure, he won't continue to keep up those lofty marks, but there's reason to believe that the improvements are real. He's posted a 19.6% swinging-strike rate -- tops among qualified starters -- supporting the spike in punchouts, and it's also come with a change in his pitch selection. As an Astro, Cole has decreased his fastball usage -- a pitch that performed poorly in 2017 -- in favor of his breaking balls, with a particularly big jump for his slider. And if that wasn't enough, the early returns on said fastball are vastly improved as well. In all, despite the small sample size, there's enough evidence to buy into Cole 2.0, and let's not forget that he was pretty darn good in 2015 before dropping off the past couple seasons. He's the top arm on the board, and good luck to the Texas Rangers, who just lost Elvis Andrus and got their bells rung by Cole in his opening start.